■ IDEALLY, families are groups of people of more than one generation who have a

passion for living together. No child growing up in a family, of course, has anything to compare it with for some time; nor is the child in a position to leave. To begin with, whatever the actual arrangements, the family from the child’s point of view is just the way the world is.

The child in the family is, in this sense, like Sartre’s rebel: the person who keeps the world the same so he can go on rebelling against it. He is not the revolutionary who wants to change the world. However discontented we are at the beginning of our lives we are not, for many years, critics of the family. And when we first become critics of the family we are critics of our own families, not of what we might later call “the family”.

If the family, at its very best, inspires and is inspired by a passion for living together, this passion, like all passions, involves frustration. The thing the family exposes, perhaps more intensely than any of our other social arrangements, is each individual member’s capacity to bear frustration. What is revealed in every family is the way each person deals with frustration, their attitude to it. However good the family is, it is where we learn not to get what we want, and how to do this. Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person; after you have children you understand how wars start.

In so far as people want to have children and regulate their sexual desire, it has been

very difficult to live in a way that makes the problem of the family disappear. Modern critics of the family have been unable to provide compelling or even plausible alternatives to it – alternatives that have caught on. Of course, families come in more configurations, more unprecedented varieties now than ever before, but they are all variations on a theme. That theme seems

to be the link between having children and the organising of desire.

The question is: what, if anything, does the raising of children require us to be faithful to? In our erotic lives we abandon our children, and in our familial lives we abandon our desire. It is not that couples with children don’t desire each other, even though the having of children radically refigures desire in the couple; it’s that their erotic connection, in the moments of enacted desire, excludes the children. In the family, of whatever configuration, what cannot be hidden is the fact that two people’s pleasure in each other is always someone else’s exclusion, and that in our pleasure, whatever else we are doing, we are frustrating someone. This is one of the things that makes our pleasure-seeking so difficult, so guilty, so confounding. Couples, of whatever kind, can be partners in crime. Once they have children they are the criminals.

Most people feel far worse about betraying their children than about betraying their

partner, and children can be used far more effectively for the policing of desire than partners. At its most extreme it is as though the thing we can’t do to our children is live our desire outside the family. Given that we can’t always live our desire that intensely inside the family, it might seem as if a strange sacrifice is being made. In so far as we have become the animals who have to choose between having children or having sex, we have made a terrible pact that must be to everyone’s detriment, particularly the children’s. It casts them as both the objects and the saboteurs of their parents’ desire. This could make someone at once both a critic of the family and unable to conceive of anything better. ●

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst. His most recent book, where this essay appears, is Side Effects (Hamish Hamilton, 2006)

His family is his world, but how do the adults make it work for them?

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www.newscientist.com 2 September 2006 | NewScientist | 47

Perspectives

Designed both to regulate sexual relationships and to nurture children, families are fraught with conflict. But it’s hard to think of a better alternative, says Adam Phillips

Things we do for love

“We have made a terrible pact that must be to everyone’s detriment”

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